Shepherd and Sheep under the Trees

In July 1897, nine years after Anton Mauve died, the Paris dealers Boussod, Valadon and Company, the successors of Goupil, sold this canvas of a shepherd and his flock in the shade of trees to Alexander Young, a London collector of French and Dutch landscape painting. In 1906, the year before Young died, the London dealers Thomas Agnew and Sons bought his collection and sold the pictures on, some to collectors in London and this one to the Kraushaar galleries in New York. From there it went to Boston, to Robert Dawson Evans and his wife Maria Antoinette, and she left it to the museum in 1917.

The museum gives the picture no date. Mauve signed it at lower right, A Mauve, followed by f for fecit, made it. The one photograph of it the museum has published is in black and white.